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CHILDREN of CHINA 





It would be quite impolite to forget to give a 
visitor tea, no matter when he comes 















CHILDREN OF 
CHINA 


By 

GRACE KINER , 

U 

Drawings by 

RUTH KELLOGG { 

> 


THOMAS S. ROCKWELL COMPANY 

CHICAGO 

1931 

















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Cc 

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Copyright, 1931, by 
THOMAS S. ROCKWELL CO. 

CHICAGO 


Printed in United States of America 


©CU 38864 - 

15 |33(l 


CONTENTS 


I Babies in Cathay 7 

Marco Polo — Spirits-good and bad—Names 
— Birthdays—Bright clothes—Colored hjtes 

II Dragons Everywhere 19 

Painted dragons—Storm dragons—Dragon 
boats — Pagodas—Real animals in China 

III Bird Nest Soup and Sharks’ Fins 27 

Queer Chinese foods — Chopsticks—Strange 
fishermen — Pic\led eggs—Tea drinking 

IV Farms Under Water 35 

Rice farms—Terraced fields—The story of the 
silkworm—Bamboo forests 

V Beds Made of Bricks 43 

Beds with fire underneath them—The Great 
Wall of China—River demons—House Boats 

VI Little Puppy Goes to School 47 

Examination cells — Chinese word-signs — 
Silver shoe money—Chinese villages 

VII Thf Feast of Lanterns 52 

Lanterns li\e birds and fish—Lantern parades 
— Fireciac\ers and demons—Fans 

VIII The Red Bridal Chair 59 

Gifts —Red Geese—The red bridal veil — 
Marriage processions — Jinri\ishas 










































Chapter I 


BABIES IN CATHAY 

F IVE HUNDRED years ago a young man 
named Marco Polo lived with his father 
in Italy. They had their home in Venice, which 
is a city built out over the water in the north¬ 
eastern part of the country. The father of 
Marco was a trader, and when Marco was 
twenty years old, he and his father went to 
China to buy silks and jewels to sell in Venice. 
As far as anyone knows they were the first 
travelers to go to China. 

They went to the palace of the Great Kahn, 
who was emperor of all China. He asked 
Marco to stay with him. So for several years 
the Italian boy stayed in China and traveled 
all over the country with the Great Khan. 
There is a story that the daughter of the Kahn 
fell in love with Marco and died of grief when 
he went back to Italy. 


7 


8 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


It was Marco Polo who called China by the 
pretty name that has been used by poets and 
story-tellers ever since. He called it Cathay. 

When a little boy is born in China his father 
and mother are very happy. Baby girls are not 
so welcome. The Chinese people do not like 
girls. They do not think that girls are worth 
anything. The reason for this is that the Chi¬ 
nese people have a strange religion. They think 
that when a man dies he goes to a place much 
like China. There he meets all the people who 
have died before he did. His father and grand¬ 
father and all of his other relatives are there. 
This place is ruled over by a great many spirits. 
If these spirits think that the man is a rich and 
famous man on earth, they will be good to him 
and give him a fine house to live in. If his sons 
and grandsons on earth forget him, then the 
spirits in the next world will treat him badly 
and give him only a poor hut. 

A man always wants to have many sons 
to bring gifts to his grave and burn incense be¬ 
fore the piece of wood that has his name carved 
on it in his house. Sometimes when one man 


BABIES IN CATHAY 


9 


meets another on the street instead of saying 
“Good morning,” he says. “May you have a 
hundred sons.” It is only boys who can bring 
gifts to the grave of their father and burn in¬ 
cense for him in the temples, so that is why 
girls are not wanted as much as boys are. 

There are spirits all over the world, too. 
Some of them are good, but most of them are 
bad. The bad ones spend all their time trying 
to do harm to people. It takes a great deal of 
thought to fool them, and keep them from 
hurting the people on earth. The men think 
that their fathers in the next world can talk 
to these evil spirits and get them to do wicked 
deeds to the men on earth if the men on earth 
do not remember their dead ancestors. To keep 
that from happening the Chinese men visit the 
tombs of their ancestors often, take gifts to 
them, and burn incense sticks before the an¬ 
cestral tablets on all the holidays. 

It is these bad little spirits, or wicked devils, 
all about the earth that the Chinese think make 
all the sickness and all the accidents and every¬ 
thing else that is bad. If the rains do not 




10 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


come when they want them, they say that the 
Rain God is angry. If the river gets so swollen 
with rain and melted snow that it overflows 
its bank, they say that the River Demon is cross 
with the people along the banks. Everything 
bad is blamed on such devils. 

The little boy must have a name, and his 
parents pick some bad name to fool the spirits. 
They will call him something like Little Puppy, 
or Foolish Monkey, or, if he is the third son, 
Number Three. The Chinese words for Little 
Puppy are Hsiao Gwoh , which really means 
Small Doggie. Sometimes they even call him 
Little Girl, to trick the spirits into thinking 
that he is a girl. Girls are not worth anything, 
and the spirits never waste their time doing 
harm to them. 

When Little Puppy is old enough to go to 
school, that is, when he is about seven years 
old, he is given his real name. His real name 
will be a lucky one, like Great Wealth or Long 
Life or Good Health. He writes his name 
backwards. That is, he puts his family name, 
which is our last name, first. Chao Kwang Yin 


BABIES IN CATHAY 


11 


was the name of a famous Chinese emperor who 
lived a thousand years ago. Chao was his fam¬ 
ily name, as Smith or Brown is the family name 
of an American boy. Kwang and Yin were 
the emperor’s own names. If a boy named 
Richard Henry Smith were to write his name 
like a Chinese boy does, he would write it 
Smith Richard Henry. In many families the 
little girls are loved and cared for just as much 
as are the boys. Girls are often given flower 
names, like Hwa Hoong, which means Red 
Flower. Others may be called Blue Blossom 
or Silver Needle or Green Leaf. 

Little Puppy was dressed in thick clothes 
wrapped closely around him. He did not have 
a cradle, but slept on the bed with his mother. 
His father and his uncles shot off firecrackers 
to celebrate his birthday. The firecrackers did 
two things; they showed how joyful the family 
was because they had a new little son, and 
they were supposed to frighten the devils away 
from the baby. When little Red Flower was 
born, some firecrackers were fired off, but not 
so many, because she was a girl. They were 




12 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


not so glad to have a girl, and they thought 
that the bad spirits would not bother much 
about a girl anyway. 

A baby is said to be a year old when he is 
born in China. Little Puppy was born in the 
month of December. Then at New Year’s he 
had a birthday and was two years old. In Amer¬ 
ica his mother would have said that he was 
just one month old. Everyone in China has 
their birthday at the same time. Everyone gets 
a year older at New Year’s. It is the birthday 
of the year and the birthday of everybody in 
China all at the same time. No matter when 
a Chinaman or a Chinawoman is born, he has 
his birthday on New Year’s Day and is one 
year older. It is the big holiday of the year 
and lasts for two weeks, like Christmas and 
summer vacations rolled into one. 

When Little Puppy and Red Flower are one 
month old they are christened and all their 
relatives come to a feast. The relatives must 
bring gifts of money and food and clothing to 
the baby. They are given a slice of roast pork 
to take home with them. The Chinese people 



BABIES IN CATHAY 


13 


are so fond of roast pork that they have it at 
all their feasts. Just before his christening, Lit¬ 
tle Puppy had his head shaved all around except 
for a little space on top. The little bit left on 
top was saved to grow into a cue. Not many 
Chinamen wear cues now, but they still shave 
their heads. At the end of a hundred days 
the hair is thrown into a river or lake. That 
is supposed to bring the child long life. About 
the year 1300 an emperor forced the Chinese 
men to let their hair grow into cues as a sign 
that he had defeated them in battle. They 
have worn them ever since until the last few 
years. China has been a republic with a presi¬ 
dent since 1912 . Since it has been a republic, 
most of the men have cut off their cues. 

When the babies are a month old, they can 
be fed rice cakes and tea. When they are four 
months old, they can be given pigs’ feet to eat. 
The Chinese think the pigs’ feet help them 
learn to walk. In one year they can have rice. 
They are not given milk, because there are not 
many cows in China, and most Chinese people 
have never tasted milk, butter, or cheese. 


14 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


Chinese children are never noisy; they must 
obey their parents and never cause them any 
trouble. Little girls often have to do what 
their brothers want them to do, even if the 
brothers are younger than they are. They do 
not run and shout or answer back when they 
are spoken to. Sometimes a Chinese child is 
whipped for something that he did not do 
because he has been taught not to answer his 
father. An American child would think that 
it was very hard to be so quiet and solemn, but 
that is the way children have been taught to 
act in China for thousands of years. 

The first duty of a Chinese child is to please 
his parents. Little Puppy and Red Flower are 
told many stories about children who did kind 
deeds for their parents. One of these stories is 
about a little boy whose mother was sick. She 
had been sick for a long time and had grown 
tired of the food that the servant cooked for 
her. The rice did not taste very good to her, 
and she was tired of the chicken and duck that 
was stewed for her. One day she said that 
she would like to have some fish to eat. 


BABIES IN CATHAY 


IS 


Her little son heard her. Early the next 
morning he went down to the river to see if 
he could get a fish for his mother. But it was 
in the middle of the winter and the river was 
all frozen over. The ice was so thick that he 
could not break it with his hatchet. Then he 
went back to the house and heard his mother 
say again that she wanted fish to eat. The 
good little boy took his hook and line and 
went back to the river again. He wrapped his 
woolen coat around him and laid down on 
the thick ice. 

It was bitterly cold and he thought that he 
would freeze to death, but he stayed there all 
day until the ice under him began to melt 
because of the warmth of his body and the 
thick woolen coat. After a long time there was 
a hole melted in the ice big enough to fish 
through. The boy put down his line and 
caught a big fish. He ran home with it. The 
servant cooked it for his mother. She ate it 
and was soon well. 

Little Puppy and Red Flower play and work 
together until they are about seven years old. 


16 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


Then the boy goes off to school, and the girl 
has her feet bound. Both of them go to school 
in some parts of China now, and it is against 
the law to bind little girls’ feet, but it is still done 
everywhere except near the coast. There are 
many English and American people living in 
the cities on the eastern coast of China, and 
the Chinese people are learning to dress and 
act as they do. But back in the other parts 
of the great country they do just as they did 
three thousand years ago. 

There is a story which explains why the 
Chinese ladies bind their feet. About the year 
300, Kang Hsi, a great emperor, had a wife 
with a twisted foot. She did not want anyone 
to see that her foot was crooked, so she wrapped 
it up in yellow silk. All of the ladies of the 
court wanted their feet to look like those of 
the empress. Therefore they all tied up their 
feet with cloth and tried to make them as small 
as they could. Then it came to be the fashion 
to have tiny feet. They call them golden lilies, 
because of the yellow silk cloth that the empress 
used to bind her crippled foot. 


BABIES IN CATHAY 


17 


Only slave girls have big feet. The other 
girls have them tied up when they are young, 
so that there isn’t much left of them but a heel 
and big toe. They are sometimes only three 
inches long. They are not much good to 
walk with, and Chinese women with bound 
feet can go only very short distances. They 
have to be carried in chairs, either fastened be¬ 
tween mules, or carried by servants. They 
make fine silk shoes, covered with lovely em¬ 
broidery for the useless little feet. No man of 
high rank will marry a girl with large feet. It 
is terribly painful to have feet bound. The 
Chinese have a saying: For every pair of bound 
feet there is a bed full of tears. They mean 
that it hurts so badly that the little girl cries 
for many nights. But she wants to have her feet 
bound, otherwise she would not be fashionable, 
and people might think she was a slave girl. 

Red Flower and Little Puppy wear almost 
the same kind of clothes. They have loose 
trousers that are tied around their ankles and 
a short coat that comes to the knees. The 
little boy wears bright red and green and 



18 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


purple clothes, often with a great deal of em¬ 
broidery on them. Red Flower may have 
clothes of duller colors. She wears her hair 
puffed out around her face with fine silver 
ornaments in it. In the winter time they wear 
heavier garments. Not many Chinese houses 
have stoves for heating. Northern China has 
severe winter weather, but Chinese people put 
on heavier clothes instead of making a fire. 
They look very fat in the winter time because 
of the thick padded clothes they wear. In the 
hot summer time they may run about the yard 
with scarcely any clothing on at all. 

There are more kites in China than anywhere 
else in the world—both little boys and grown 
men fly them. They make lovely ones shaped 
like birds and fish and flowers and paint them 
all kinds of bright colors. They are light be¬ 
cause the frames are of bamboo sticks with 
paper pasted over them. Sometimes the boys 
have kite fights and try to knock each others’ 
kites out of the sky. As soon as he learned 
to walk, Little Puppy’s father gave him a kite 
and taught him to fly it. 

\ 




Chapter II 


DRAGONS EVERYWHERE 

E VERYWHERE in China there are drag¬ 
ons. Not real live dragons, but images 
of them carved on the walls and on the roofs 
of temples. Pictures of them are painted on 
the walls of houses and on silk banners. The 
women embroider dragons on silks to use for 
coats or for wall hangings. Artists paint them 
in pictures. Before the days of the republic 
a black dragon was on the flag of China. The 
little demons in the air try to do harm to the 
people of China, but the dragons are thought 
to be friends of everyone. 

Nobody ever saw a real dragon, of course, 
but they believe in them just the same. A 
long time ago, when China was first settled, 
the first Chinese found the bones of great beasts 
in the earth. These beasts were animals thirty 
and forty feet long that lived on earth before 


19 


20 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


men came to live here. They lived in the 
swamps and ate the tall grass and ferns. They 
lived and died before men came to the earth, 
but their bones remained in the swamps for a 
long time. They are called dinosaurs. 

The first Chinese found these great bones and 
thought that they belonged to dragons that 
lived in China before men came. The first 
emperors took the dragons for their own special 
animal. The dragon that the emperors had 
was painted with five toes and a head like a 
camel. Common people could have dragons 
with only four toes carved or painted on their 
walls. All dragons have whiskers under their 
chins, and their bodies are long and coiled up 
like a snake. 

The dragons are supposed to cause storms. 
A dragon is curled up in a cave at the bottom 
of the sea. He makes the water rough when 
he is angry. The rain dragon is especially long 
and snake-like. In his pictures he is always 
coiled up among clouds with his head show¬ 
ing and with two horns like a goat. 

Chinese painters do not care if the pictures 



The dragon is always coiled up among the clouds with 
his head showing and with two horns li\e a goat 






22 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


that they paint do not look real. They want 
to show the soul or spirit of the animal or 
man that they are painting. If they make a 
drawing of a fish, they want to get the soul 
of the fish in the drawing, not just what the 
fish looks like on the outside. There is a good 
story about an artist who painted a picture of 
a dragon on the wall of a house. He was a 
good artist, and the picture was like the real 
spirit of the rain dragon. Then one day a 
thunder storm came up. There was a loud 
clap of thunder and the dragon got off the wall 
and disappeared into the rain clouds. The 
artist had been too good, for he had to go to 
work and make another picture on the wall. 

Dragons are so popular in China that they 
are painted on dishes and on fans and on the 
covers of books. One of the holidays is a dragon 
festival. On that day dragons hundreds of 
feet long, made out of paper, are carried 
through the streets. Dragon-boats are launched 
on the rivers, and races are held. The people 
think that the dragons will help in times of 
sickness. Every drug shop keeps a supply of 


DRAGONS EVERYWHERE 


23 


ground-up dragon bones to use for medicine. 
Ground dragon bones are supposed to give any¬ 
one who takes them much strength. If a boy is 
afraid of anything, his parents get some for 
him to take so that he will be brave. 

Before a city is built in China, the priests 
go out and try to find the dragon that is buried 
in the earth. They think that a city must be 
built where there is a dragon. When they 
have found the dragon’s tail, the people get to 
work and build a pagoda on top of the dragon’s 
tail to hold it down, so that the dragon can 
never leave the city. Every town has a pagoda; 
a big city may have a dozen or more of them. 
Each one is holding down a dragon’s tail. 

Pagodas are little towers of several stories. 
Some of them have nine or ten little balconies 
around the tower. Many of the towers do not 
have stairways and no one can go up into them, 
but others have circular stairways like a light¬ 
house. From the top of these people may get 
a view of the city. 

There are many real animals in China along 
with the imaginary dragons. Camels are com- 





24 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


mon. People do not ride on them very much, 
as they do down in Africa, but they are used to 
carry goods. In the north and west of the 
country very little rain falls. The land is cold 
and like a desert in many places. Here there are 
no railroads, and food and clothing and all 
kinds of freight is shipped on the backs of 
camels. They are tied together in long caravans 
with ropes that run through their noses; some¬ 
times a hundred camels are fastened in a row. 

When Little Puppy and his mother went 
to visit his grandmother they did not go on 
a train or in an automobile. The roads were 
not good enough for automobiles. Instead, 
they rode in a sort of covered chair set up on 
two poles. A donkey was hitched between 
the poles in front and behind. On the road 
they met a great many wheelbarrows. The 
Chinese wheelbarrows are not made like those 
in America. They have one big wheel in the 
middle with shelves on each side of it. A 
donkey pulls the barrow in front. If the don¬ 
key is not strong enough, sometimes a man is 
hitched up with him. The wheelbarrows carry 


DRAGONS EVERYWHERE 


25 


all sorts of things. Little Puppy saw one with 
great bales of cotton fastened to either side, go¬ 
ing down to the cotton mill. On another a 
woman and little girl were riding on one side 
and a pig was tied on to the other shelf. The 
little girl’s father was helping pull the load. 

They went past a great many men carrying 
poles on their shoulders and with boxes or 
bags tied to the ends of the poles. Most of 
the freight of China is carried by men on poles 
over their shoulders. In some of the towns the 
women of the lowest class, who do not have 
bound feet, carry goods this way. 

Little Puppy saw some carts with two great 
wooden wheels being dragged along by mules 
or buffaloes. They made a great squeaking and 
whining, because nobody in China ever puts 
grease on their cart wheels. When the road 
went along by the river, the little boy saw hun¬ 
dreds of boats with brown sails made out of 
woven mats. 

At home Little Puppy and Red Flower have 
many dogs. One kind of little dog is called the 
Pekingese, or sleeve dog. They are so small 



26 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


that they can be carried in their master’s sleeve. 
If the master gets a bit of food that he does 
not like, he gives it to the little dog in his sleeve 
and no one notices it. 

The father of Red Flower and Little Puppy 
had a pet bird. He kept it chained by one 
foot to a little perch made of two sticks. Often 
when he went out to walk in the evening he 
took his bird along. Some of the birds sing 
and some of them are kept for their pretty 
colors. 

There are very few horses and cows in Little 
Puppy’s country. Instead of horses, the people 
use mules and donkeys to ride and drive. The 
farmers use great water buffaloes with wide- 
spreading horns to do the work in the rice 
fields. The buffaloes look very fierce, but they 
are really so gentle that Red Flower could lead 
one of them out to pasture by a string run 
through his nose. 












Chapter III 


BIRD NEST SOUP AND SHARKS’ FINS 



T ALL the feasts at Little Puppy’s house 


JL jl they had bird nest soup. It is one of 
the queerest of all the Chinese foods. The bird 
that makes the nest is called the swiftlet. It 
looks very much like a little swallow and makes 
its nest in caves by the sea. The nests are about 
the size of a goose’s egg and are white or pink. 
They do not have sticks and feathers mixed 
with them, but are built out of a sort of gum 
that the bird makes in its mouth. Men climb 
up the sides of the sea caves to get the nests. 

The nests are dried before they are sold in 
the stores. When they are put into water or 
thin soup and boiled for a long time, they make 
it thick and gummy, like a clear slippery mush. 
It doesn’t have very much taste, but Little Puppy 
and his family think it is delicious. It is the 
first course at every grand dinner party. 


27 


28 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


Chinese food is always cut up fine and made 
into stews or broths. That is because they do 
not use forks and knives when they eat. They 
use two sticks about ten inches long and about 
as thick as a pencil. These are called chopsticks. 
The chopsticks are made of bamboo or bone, 
or, if the family is rich, they may be made of 
ivory, carved with fine figures. At the table 
in front of each person is a bowl full of rice. 
Little Puppy and his brothers must ask their 
father’s permission before then can sit down at 
the table. They hold their chopsticks between 
their first fingers and reach for pieces of meat 
from the dishes of stew in the center of the 
table. These pieces they lay on top of the rice 
in the bowl. When they have enough meat 
they lift the bowl up against the lower lip and 
use the sticks to push the rice into their mouths. 
If there is soup it is dished into their bowls 
with little ladles. If Little Puppy gets his 
fingers dirty while he is eating, a servant comes 
with a wet towel so that he may clean them. 

Everyone eats rice in China. The stoves are 
made with a hollow for cooking rice built into 


BIRD NEST SOUP AND SHARKS’ FINS 29 


the top. There, rice is cooking all day long. 
When the pot is empty, it is scraped out and 
at once more rice is put on to cook. When one 
man meets another on the street he does not 
always say, “How do you do”; he may say, 
“Have you eaten rice?” The Chinese words 
for that are Chih-fahn. When the rice crop 
fails, hundreds of people starve to death. 
Babies are given rice to eat when they are only 
a few months old. Rice is pounded up into 
flour, and the flour is used to make cakes of 
all kinds. At every feast there are rice-flour 
cakes made in the shape of a turtle, for the turtle 
is the sign of long life. 

Everyone in China is fond of fish. They eat 
a great deal of it. Fish takes the place of the 
meat that they are often too poor to buy. When 
Little Puppy was going to visit his grandmother 
he passed along a river. Out on the river was 
a man fishing with cormorants. He had a little 
boat with perches for the great black birds 
built out along the sides. Ten cormorants were 
sitting on the perches. They are birds that live 
on fish. Each one has a large pouch beneath 




30 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


his beak where he stores the fish that he 
catches until he can come to the top of the 
water and swallow them. 

To keep his birds from swallowing the fish 
that they caught, the fisherman had tied a string 
around each one’s neck just below the pouch. 
When he gave a signal the big birds dived off 
the boat into the water. They can swim under 
water for a long time without coming up for 
breath, and they can go so fast that they can 
catch almost any kind of fish. When they had 
their pouches full they came back to the boat. 
They are trained to come back to the boat when 
he whistles, whether they have filled their 
pouches or not. Then they have to give him 
the fish in their pouches. At night he takes 
the string off their necks and feeds them the 
little fish that he does not want to sell. He 
throws the fish to the birds and they catch them. 
Then he ties the birds to the perches with a 
cord around one leg. 

Farther up the river Little Puppy saw a man 
with a duck raft. It was a broad raft with a 
little fence around it. On the raft were about 


BIRD NEST SOUP AND SHARKS’ FINS 31 


two hundred ducks. The owner of the raft 
was pushing it along with a pole. When he 
came to a marshy place on the edge of the 
river he pushed the raft to the bank and fastened 
it to a tree. Then he opened a little gate and 
all the ducks rushed out into the swampy place 
and began to hunt for grubs and worms. They 
poked their broad yellow bills into the mud and 
quacked happily when they found food. At 
night their owner called them and they all came 
running to the raft. They hurried because they 
knew that the last one would get a hard slap 
with a stick. During the night the raft would 
float down the river to another swamp where 
there were grubs and worms to hunt for. By 
the time the ducks were ready to sell, the owner 
would try to be near a city where there was a 
good market for ducks. 

Red Flower had often seen her mother use 
dried eggs to cook with. There are great fac¬ 
tories in many Chinese cities that dry eggs. The 
eggs are brought to the factory in baskets that 
hold a bushel or more. Boats on the rivers 
leading to the town collect the eggs and bring 


32 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


them to the factory. There, girls break them 
and separate the yolks from the whites. A girl 
can break and separate about five thousand eggs 
in a day. Then the egg mixture is dried and 
packed into tins for shipping. The yellow 
powder made by drying the yolks is used by 
bakers and confectioners. The dried whites 
are used in place of fresh eggs in cooking and 
making medicines. There is a factory in 
Shanghai that can dry more than a million eggs 
in one day. 

At banquets the children had eaten pickled 
eggs. Sometimes they were a year old. Every¬ 
one thought that they were a very fine food. 
The eggs are covered with a paste made of salt 
and ashes and soda and put in a jar for thirty 
days or more. Sometimes they are buried in 
the ground. When they are old enough they 
are taken out and the shells taken off. They 
are stiff by this time and taste very different 
from fresh eggs. Some kinds become black. 

Nobody in China ever drinks cold water. It 
is always made into tea, and served after meals 
in cups without handles. No one puts sugar 


BIRD NEST SOUP AND SHARKS’ FINS 33 


or cream or lemon in their tea. They would 
think that the flavor was completely spoiled if 
they put anything in it. They like the green 
tea best. They do not use saucers, either. The 
English people got the idea of using saucers 
from someone who made little plates to set on 
top of the cup to keep the tea from getting cold. 
Then someone thought of putting the little plate 
under the cup so that it would be easier to carry, 
and that is how we came to use saucers. The 
English began to use tea about the year 1700. 
At first they called it tay, and the word is still 
pronounced like that in Scotland and Ireland. 
The English people did not like to hold the 
little cups full of hot tea in their hands. So 
they invented a handle to put on the side of 
the cup. But nobody in China ever has a handle 
on his cup, nor does he have a saucer. 

Early in her life Red Flower was taught to 
offer hot tea to anyone who came to call. It 
would be quite impolite to forget to give a 
visitor tea, no matter when he came. They 
make a noise when they drink their tea that 
is to show that they are enjoying it. The people 


34 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


at the table make a noise when they eat, too, 
to show that they like the food. To eat quietly 
in China is to be ill-mannered. 

Two meals a day are usually enough. One 
comes in the morning about ten o’clock; the 
other at night about five. There may be a 
luncheon in the middle of the day of tea and 
little cakes, but no big meal then. 

Sharks’ fins are bought dried, unless the 
family lives very near the seashore. The shark 
is a great fish that is so fierce that sometimes 
it kills men who fall into the water. The 
fins are made of large spikes of bone covered 
with a thin layer of flesh and skin. It took 
Red Flower and her mother a long time to 
prepare them for eating. First the dry piece 
of fin had to be soaked for a long time. Then 
it had to be boiled in water with wood ashes; 
then the skin had to be scraped off. After that 
it had to be boiled in several other waters until 
the meat could be taken away from the bones 
and cut into small pieces for eating. Sharks’ 
fins are expensive; so only rich people can afford 
to eat them. 


Chapter IV 


FARMS UNDER WATER 

I T WAS spring when Little Puppy and his 
mother went to visit his grandmother, so 
that he saw the farmers all along the way 
planting their rice. The donkeys that carried 
the chair in which he and his mother were 
riding could go only about four miles in an 
hour, which gave him plenty of time to see 
people working the farms along the way. 

Since everyone in China eats rice at every 
meal there must be a great deal of it raised. It 
is a hard crop to grow, too, harder than wheat 
or oats or corn. Early in the spring the farmers 
sow the rice in special seed beds that are very 
wet, for rice is a wet weather plant and must 
have a great deal of water all its life in order 
to grow. The grains sprout in a few days and 
are allowed to grow in the seed beds until they 
are six or eight inches tall. That takes about 

35 


36 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


a month. Before the farmer starts to plant his 
field he floods it with water for several days. 
Then the sprouts are transplanted to the field 
while it is under water. The little rice plants 
are taken from the seed bed and planted in 
rows in the mud of the field. Both men and 
women work for many days in water up to 
their knees before the fields are all planted. 

The fields must be kept under water most of 
the summer or the rice will not grow. The 
farmers wade in the water up and down the 
rows pulling out the weeds. The rice looks 
much like oats or wheat growing. When it 
is ripe in September it is a bright golden color. 

Rice is sometimes too expensive for the poor¬ 
est people, even in China, where so much of 
it is grown. The people who cannot afford 
rice eat millet and other grains cooked up into 
a kind of mush. The names for meals in China 
all have the word rice in them. Breakfast is 
called chiu-fan, or morning rice. Ye-fan , which 
means late rice, and man-fan , or evening rice, 
are the names for dinner. If a person is sick 
his friends will say, “He cannot eat his rice.” 


FARMS UNDER WATER 


37 


There are so many people in China that they 
do not let a single bit of land go to waste. The 
men carry earth from the river banks up on to 
the rocky sides of the mountains and make 
little fields there like wide shelves. Those fields 
are called terraced fields. If the terraced fields 
are on the south slope of the mountains, tea 
bushes will probably be planted on them. 

The tea bushes are planted in rows about 
three feet apart. The plants grow three or four 
or five feet tall and have leaves much like rose 
leaves all over the branches. The tea bushes 
are evergreens, therefore they do not lose their 
leaves in the winter. The leaves are a sort of 
smoky gray-green and the flowers are like wild 
roses with thick waxy petals. Some of the 
blossoms are white and some are pink and they 
smell very sweetly when the field is in bloom. 

When he went to school Little Puppy learned 
that his country made about one-third of all 
the silk in the world. On his journey he saw 
many groves of mulberry trees whose leaves 
were used to feed the silkworms. His mother 
told him the story of how silk came to be made 






38 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


in China. About five thousand years ago in 
Hang-Chow-Foo, which means the City of 
Heaven, the southern capital of China, lived 
the Empress Si-Ling-shi. One day, as she was 
walking in her garden, she saw a caterpillar 
making a cocoon on a mulberry tree. She was 
interested in seeing how cunningly the insect 
wrapped the thread around himself and fas¬ 
tened his little cradle to the branch. She liked 
the bright shining thread of which he made 
the cocoon. She took the cocoon into the house 
and soaked it in water until she could unwind 
the thread. That was the first silk thread in 
the world. It is called si in China after her. 
In France they changed the name to sole, in 
England it is called silk. Si-Ling-shi is called 
the Goddess of the Silkworms, and every year 
when the mulberry leaves first open a feast is 
held in her honor. 

For two thousand years the Chinese manu¬ 
factured and sold silk, but they kept the secret 
of how it was made. Kings of other nations 
came to conquer parts of China and took away 
with them bales of fine silk, but they did not 


v 




FARMS UNDER WATER 


39 


find out how to make it themselves. It was 
not until about three hundred years after the 
birth of Christ that the secret was discovered. 
Some Japanese soldiers captured four Chinese 
maidens from a silk-making village. After a 
time the girls came to love the men who had 
carried them away from their homes and told 
them how the silk was made. Then the 
Japanese men made another war on the silk¬ 
weaving village and carried off a tray of the 
silkworms to Japan. Since that time silk has 
been made in Japan, for the mulberry trees 
that the worms feed upon grow in Japan as 
well as in China. 

The silk moth is a little white insect about 
two inches across the wings. The mother moth 
lays about five hundred pale tan eggs, each one 
about the size of the head of a pin. 

In a few days the little worms hatch. They 
are at first just tiny black hair-like creatures. 
They are hungry and soon get their first meal 
of chopped up mulberry leaves. 

It takes thirty-two days before the silkworm 
is full-grown. As it grows bigger its skin does 





40 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


not grow, so that every four or five days it has 
to shed one skin and get a bigger one. The 
full-grown worm is about two inches long, 
about as big around as a man’s little finger, 
and pale yellow in color. Then it is ready for 
the work of making silk. The girls know 
when the worm is full-grown and take him out 
of the tray and put him on a frame made of 
bamboo sticks. 

Here he begins to spin. He makes a very 
fine silk thread in his body, which he then 
spins from his mouth. This thread he throws 
around and around his body until he is all 
wrapped in a blanket made of tiny silk threads. 
It takes him two or three days to make this 
house for himself. As soon as he has finished, 
the girls take the cocoon and place it near a 
charcoal fire, close enough so that the worm 
inside is killed by the heat. They put the 
cocoon into warm water to loosen the silk 
threads, which are then unwound. There is 
sometimes as much as twelve hundred yards 
of thread in one cocoon. This thread is so 
very fine that it takes several strands of it 



Chinese girls are skilled workers in the sil\ industry 


41 
















































42 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


together to make ordinary silk thread such 
as is sold on spools. The silk that is unwound 
from the cocoons is called raw silk and is sold 
to factories. There it is dyed and spun into 
cloth. Some of the cloth is woven in China, 
but much of the raw silk is sold to England 
and the United States. 

When Little Puppy had almost reached his 
grandmother’s house, he saw groves of bamboo 
trees. They were seventy and eighty feet tall 
with feathery tops. He had eaten the sprouts 
of the bamboo at home, but he had never seen 
the trees before. He knew that the wood was 
used to make rooms and walls of some houses, 
and at his own home they had baskets and chairs 
made out of it. His little umbrella had a handle 
and ribs of split bamboo. His mother told 
him that the trunks of the larger trees were 
used for water pipes because they were hollow. 



Chapter V 


BEDS MADE OF BRICKS 

1 ITTLE PUPPY found that his grand- 
J mother’s house was large and made of 
wood. It was not like houses in America, 
because it was made up of several smaller houses 
all set around an open yard. There were no 
windows in the outside walls of the house, 
but there were windows opening into the court¬ 
yard. Only one door opened into the street. 
Little Puppy was taken to his grandmother in 
the woman’s part of the house. His mother 
was very happy to be in her old home again, 
although she was no longer considered her 
mother’s daughter. When a girl is married in 
China, people think that she is not the daughter 
of her mother any more; she is thought to be 
the daughter of her husband’s mother. 

That night the visitors slept on a bed built 
of bricks along the wall of the room. They 

43 


44 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


had plenty of padded cotton comforters to put 
under and over them, but the night was cold 
and Little Puppy’s grandmother sent a servant 
to make a fire under the bed to warm it. The 
servant put a little fire of charcoal in the hollow 
space under the bed, and that kept them warm 
until morning. In the poorer families they 
would have burned a little bunch of straw under 
the bricks to warm the bed. 

Before he went home Little Puppy went to 
see his grandfather’s coffin. It was a gift to 
his grandfather from one of his uncles. They 
do not wait to get the coffin in China until 
someone is dead, but one of the sons buys it 
for his father or for his mother as a birthday 
present. Then they keep it in the house until 
it is needed. The coffin that was for the grand¬ 
father was finely made. It was built of a heavy 
dark wood and was beautifully carved. 

Going home they followed a different road 
and saw the Great Wall of China. The Great 
Wall was built hundreds of years ago to keep 
out the Tartars, a very fierce race of warriors 
who were coming from the north to drive the 


BEDS MADE OF BRICKS 


45 


Chinese out of their homes. It begins at the 
China Sea and goes across the northern part of 
the province of China proper and stops at the 
great desert of Gobi in the north. It is more 
than fifteen hundred miles long. It goes over 
mountains and through river valleys. Towers 
were built every little way so that warriors 
could look far out over the enemies’ country. 
All along the top on the outside is a high, 
narrow fence with openings every few feet for 
the archers to shoot through. 

As they crossed a bridge, Little Puppy leaned 
out of the chair and saw great hooks fastened 
under the bridge. He asked his mother what 
they were for. She told him that there were 
great floods in the river every spring when the 
snow up in the mountains melted. The water 
came so far up the banks that many of the 
people who lived along the edge were drowned. 
The people thought that the floods were caused 
by the flood demon and put the hooks there to 
try and catch him as he came down the river. 

Two great rivers, the Yangtze and the 
Hwang, or Yellow River, run through China 


46 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


and down into the China Sea and the Yellow 
Sea. All along these rivers Little Puppy saw 
houseboats with families living in them. They 
all were little low boats with great brown sails 
of matting to catch the wind. If they are 
going up the river, men and donkeys pull them 
along with a rope. The family lives under 
an arched roof made of mats and do their 
cooking over a little stove up in the front of 
the boat. Most of the people who live on the 
boats are fishers. The children of the house¬ 
boats always have little barrels tied to their 
backs, so that if they fall off the boat in their 
play they will not sink before they are rescued. 
Every boat has eyes painted on each side of its 
prow. That is so the boat can see where it 
is going. They think that the boat would be 
wrecked surely if it did not have eyes. Even 
the little boats that go out to meet the big ships 
in the harbor have eyes painted on the sides. 












Chapter VI 


LITTLE PUPPY GOES TO SCHOOL 

I ITTLE PUPPY should not be called Little 
•J Puppy any more after he goes to school, 
because then he gets his real name; but since 
we do not know his real name, we will go on 
calling him that. The schools of China have 
changed a great deal in the last few years. 
Before the country became a republic in 1912 
the boys went to a school where they did noth¬ 
ing but memorize several books. They did not 
know what they were memorizing, but they 
learned them anyway. All the pupils studied 
aloud. If one of them stopped shouting, the 
teacher thought that he had stopped studying 
and punished him. When a boy thought that 
he had learned his lesson for the day, he took 
his book up to the teacher and turned his back 
and then repeated what he had learned. 

In the old days only educated men could be 


47 


48 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


officials in the government. Examinations were 
held every summer in the chief cities in the 
empire. In some towns there were great halls 
with tiny booths just big enough for one person 
and a shelf to write on, and enough booths for 
ten thousand students. The boys taking the 
examinations stayed in these little cells for three 
days and three nights writing all the time. 
Guards were outside the doors to see that no 
one helped them and their food was passed in 
through a little hole in the door. Sometimes the 
boys died in their cells from the heat and strain. 

All that is over now. The educated men 
are still wanted for government officials, but 
they do not have such terrible examinations to 
go through. There are government public 
schools, too, much like those in the United 
States, and both boys and girls can go to them. 
They teach history and geography and arith¬ 
metic and writing. Writing in China is a hard 
task because they do not have an alphabet. 
Every word has a separate symbol like a little 
picture. To learn to read a child has to learn 
thousands of different word-signs. Learning to 


LITTLE PUPPY GOES TO SCHOOL 


49 


write is like learning to draw or paint. Writing 
is done with a little brush and black ink. 

Arithmetic is hard to learn in China, too. 
The money is different from the money in 
other countries. The smallest coin is called a 
cash . It is worth one-twentieth of an American 
cent. It takes so many cash to buy anything 
that the Chinese carry them threaded on strings. 
Each of the cash has a square hole in the center 
so that it can be strung on a string. It takes 
one thousand cash to make a tael, which is a 
silver coin worth fifty cents in American money. 
They have copper pennies, too, bigger than our 
cents, and dimes of silver that are worth five 
cents in American money. One queer kind 
of money is the silver shoes. Those are pieces 
of silver weighing about a pound made in the 
shape of a tiny shoe. There is much paper 
money as well, but the Chinese do not like to 
trade with paper money very much. 

Little Puppy learns in history that China is 
one of the oldest countries in the world. Its 
history goes back for six thousand years. He 
has seen the temple in Peking where, thousands 



so 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


of years ago, the emperor used to go on the 
twenty-first of December to pray to his ances¬ 
tors, and where every spring he used to plow 
a furrow with a gold-handled plow and sow 
a handful of rice. No farmer in those days 
put in his crops until the emperor had started 
the plowing and sowing. 

The history of China is mostly about a long 
list of great families who ruled over the country 
until they were driven out by another great 
family. One of the first emperors was made 
ruler because he drained the land so that the 
farmers could raise crops. It is told that he 
had a bell hung on his gate so that if anyone 
was in trouble he could ring it and the emperor 
would come out and help him. 

Each little village in China is ruled over by 
a mandarin. He is an important person who 
wears yellow robes. Only the emperors or 
important officials could wear yellow robes in 
the old days. When the mandarin went out 
on the street, he sent men to run ahead and 
tell the people to get down on their knees 
and bow their heads before him. They do not 



LITTLE PUPPY GOES TO SCHOOL 


51 


do that any more, but the mandarin is still the 
most powerful person in the town. His wife is 
called the Tai-Tai, or Wife of the Mandarin. 
She is a powerful person also. 

Little Puppy went to school every day, for 
they do not have week-ends in China. Now 
there are schools that Red Flower can go to, 
also, and great universities are built in some of 
the large cities. There the students are taught 
much as they are in other countries. Little 
Puppy learned many of the wise sayings of the 
great scholar Confucius, who lived hundreds of 
years ago. Here are some of them: 

Within the four seas all men are brothers. 

Heaven will not keep a king who is un¬ 
kind to his people. 

He who rides a tiger cannot dismount. 

When brothers quarrel, then strangers will 
cheat them. 

The object of learning is the increase of 
knowledge. 



Chapter VII 


THE FEAST OF LANTERNS 
HINESE lanterns made of rounds of bam- 



boo covered with paper are used to light 
most of the houses and shops in China. In just 
a few of the coast cities are they beginning to 
use electric lights. The lanterns are painted 
with flowers and landscapes and figures of men 
and women. Often they are real works of art. 
The Chinese carry them at night because there 
are no street lights in most of the towns. 

One night in May Little Puppy and Red 
Flower were allowed to stay up to see the Pro¬ 
cession of the Lanterns. It was the day of the 
Feast of Lanterns. In the street outside their 
house three hundred men or more gathered, 
each one with a fine lantern. The lanterns were 
made in the shapes of fish and birds and ani¬ 
mals and they all had their candles lighted. 
They marched past the house swinging the 


52 


THE FEAST OF LANTERNS 


53 


lanterns and with bands of music playing. The 
smell of sweet incense came to the children. 
Last of all came a terrible dragon made of paper 
and about forty feet long. It took twenty men 
to carry it along on bamboo poles. Sometimes 
the lantern procession is held in the daytime, 
but it is not so long nor so pretty then. 

All along the road were beggars. They have 
a sort of beggars’ union in China with a king to 
whom they must give part of the money they 
get begging. The beggars go out in boats to 
meet the ships. They take tiny babies that cry, 
so that the people on the ship will feel sorry 
for them and give them money. All along the 
streets of the cities are beggars in rags and 
suffering with many horrible diseases. Some¬ 
times poor people sell children to the king of 
the beggars and he teaches them to beg. 

Although they know it was a sad time for 
someone, the children always liked to see a 
funeral procession. When a man dies in China, 
his sons go to the priest at the temple to find out 
when will be a lucky day to bury him. Some¬ 
times the lucky day will be several weeks off. 


54 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


While they are waiting, they put the dead man 
in his black-painted coffin that perhaps has been 
in the house for years, and all of the family sleep 
near it so that he will not be lonesome. They 
spend the time getting ready for the funeral. 

When the day finally comes for the funeral, 
men are hired to walk in the funeral proces¬ 
sion and mourn for the dead man. They think 
that the men who make a business of mourn¬ 
ing at funerals can do a better job than the 
real mourners. When the coffin is put into 
the grave, paper money and other things are 
burned and food is left on the grave. They 
think that the soul of the dead man is going 
to Tien, or Heaven, but it is several days jour¬ 
ney there and he must have food put on his 
grave every day for a time, so that he will have 
it for his trip. 

The holiday that Little Puppy and Red 
Flower liked best of all was the festival of the 
New Year. It lasted for two weeks and was 
like a vacation and a birthday party and a 
feast day all the while it lasted. The year has 
a birthday then. They think that the new year 


THE FEAST OF LANTERNS 


55 


is born on that day. Everyone in China gets 
a year older then, too. Everyone gets new 
clothes to wear for New Year’s. Red Flower 
made some new shoes all embroidered in red 
and green. Few people wear leather shoes in 
China. They are made of silk with soles of 
felt. There are not different shoes for the right 
and left feet either; both shoes are just alike. 
In the winter the shoes are set up on little pieces 
of wood, like stilts, to keep the feet out of the 
snow. The poorest people have shoes made out 
of rice straw, and their coats and hats may be 
made out of it, too. 

The week before New Year’s day Little Pup¬ 
py’s father went to see the storekeepers and 
paid all of his debts. Everyone pays all their 
debts before New Year’s. It is thought to be 
bad luck to have a debt go past that day. If a 
man cannot pay all of his debts, he pays part of 
them and perhaps the man he owes them to will 
say that he does not need to pay the rest. Every¬ 
one lays in a great store of firecrackers and fire¬ 
works of all kinds for New Year’s, just as Amer¬ 
ican families do for the Fourth of July. When 


56 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


they fire them off they think that it scares the 
unlucky demons out of their wits, so that they 
do not come back for a year. Red Flower’s 
father got some signs made of paper. These he 
put up over the door of the house. They asked 
the good spirits to come in and told the bad 
spirits to stay away. One of the signs told the 
bad spirits that everyone in the house had been 
good all year. 

During the two weeks that the New Year’s 
celebration goes on, the stores and factories 
close, and everyone has a holiday. They put 
on new clothes of red and black, for they are 
the holiday colors, and people go to call on their 
friends. They give gifts at New Year’s in 
China, as we do at Christmas time. 

Everyone in China is fond of fans. They 
have all kinds of them; some of them are 
beautifully painted and are made of ivory and 
silk; others are of paper with bamboo sticks. 
All the men carry them in the streets, and 
women use them to keep away the flies and 
to keep themselves cool. They are often given 
as presents at New Year’s. The Chinese people 



At New Year’s everyone has a holiday and wears 
new clothes of red and blac\ 


57 
















58 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


are very fond of flowers and often give them 
as gifts at the holiday time. 

They celebrate other holidays, too. Almost 
every village has its own special god or idol 
whose birthday is celebrated in that village and 
nowhere else. The time of the full moon is 
celebrated in a great many places, and the men 
who work in factories get a half-holiday. The 
women have some holidays that the men do not 
have. All their lives Little Puppy and Red 
Flower had seen processions go past the house 
and had heard the noise of firecrackers popping 
to celebrate some holiday. They did not miss 
not having Sunday or Christmas or the Fourth 
of July or Thanksgiving. 





Chapter VIII 


THE RED BRIDAL CHAIR 

W HEN Red Flower was fifteen years old, 
her father thought that it was time for 
her to be married. There are no “old maids” 
or bachelors in China. Everyone gets married. 
Red Flower’s father had a friend who had a 
son about twenty years old and he thought that 
this young man would make a good husband 
for Red Flower. He did not ask her about it. 
He did not think that she had anything to do 
with it. Girls in China are never asked about 
whom they want to marry. Their fathers and 
mothers make all the plans and then tell them 
whom they are to marry. 

Red Flower’s father did not go to see his 
friend about the marriage. That would not 
have been good manners. He sent for a woman 
who made her living making matches for other 
people. First they asked the priest if it would 

59 


60 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


be a lucky marriage. He said that it would. 
Then the matchmaker went to the father of 
the young man and asked if they would like to 
have their son marry Red Flower. They said 
that they would and sent presents to the girl’s 
family. These gifts were sent in little wooden 
boxes and money was put in one of them. That 
is why some people say that men buy their 
brides in China. 

One of the presents that the boy’s parents 
sent to Red Flower’s father and mother was a 
pair of geese. They were white geese, but their 
feathers had been dyed red, because red is the 
color for weddings. A great many of the pres¬ 
ents were red. The geese were supposed to 
show that the boy and girl were going to live 
together all their lives like the geese did. 

Red Flower did not see her husband before 
they were married. It would have been thought 
bad manners for her to see him. The wedding 
was to take place at the home of the groom 
and not at the home of the bride. That is the 
way it always is done in China. 

The man she was to marry sent a red chair 


THE RED BRIDAL CHAIR 


61 


with red curtains all around it for Red Flower 
to ride in to his house. The servants who were 
to carry it were dressed in red, too. He sent her 
the red dress and veil that she was to wear when 
she came to his house to marry him. Before 
she put on the red dress and veil, Red Flower, 
for the last time, sat down to a feast with her 
mother and sisters. There would be a feast at 
her husband’s home when she got there, but she 
could not eat it. She was expected to wait on 
her new mother-in-law there. After the feast 
was done her mother helped her put on the red 
dress and veil, and Red Flower cried and cried 
to think that she was leaving her home forever. 
If she had not felt badly she was expected to 
cry anyway. Every Chinese bride must cry 
when she leaves her father’s house. 

As she went out the door of her home, Red 
Flower threw back over her shoulder a pair 
of chopsticks to show that she would eat her 
father’s rice no longer. Then she was lifted 
into the red chair and the curtains were closed 
tightly around her so that no bad spirits could 
get in to harm her. Her father had hired bands 



62 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


to make music along the road. One band 
played behind her and one in front. They beat 
their drums and made a great amount of noise 
to show how important Red Flower’s family 
was. They went very slowly through the 
narrow streets, so that they did not stumble 
with the bridal chair. That would have 
brought bad luck to Red Flower. She could 
hear the cries of the jinrikisha coolies. 

The jinrikishas are like chairs swung 
between two wheels. The wheels have rubber 
tires on them to make the jinrikishas ride easily. 
A man pulls the little carriage by getting be¬ 
tween the shafts in front. Everyone in the 
Chinese cities travels in them. Red Flower re¬ 
membered her mother’s telling her that the jin¬ 
rikishas were invented about thirty years ago by 
a missionary who had an invalid wife. He 
wanted her to get out in the sunshine, so he 
made a jinrikisha and had his servant pull it. 

It seemed a very long time to Red Flower 
before the servants carrying her red chair 
stopped in front of the house that was to be 
her home for the rest of her life. She was 





THE RED BRIDAL CHAIR 


63 


lifted out and carried into the hall of her hus¬ 
band’s house. He met her in the hall but did 
not lift the veil that covered her face. Together 
they went into the room where his ancestral 
tablets were. There they knelt down and 
touched the floor with their foreheads. Then 
her husband burned some incense sticks before 
the tablets and they went to the kitchen where 
they knelt before the kitchen god that hung 
over the stove, so that he would give them 
plenty of food as long as they were married. 

Then they went back to a room in the 
woman’s part of the house and sat at a little 
table and ate rice and drank wine together. 
It was only then that her husband lifted her 
red veil and saw what his new bride looked 
like. The rest of the day was spent in feasting 
and displaying fireworks. At the feast Red 
Flower had to serve her new mother-in-law and 
she tried to do it as well as she could because 
from now on she had to obey her mother-in-law 
in everything. If she did not do everything 
just as she was told, her mother-in-law could 
whip her. 


64 


CHILDREN OF CHINA 


When a girl in China is married, her own 
mother is thought to be no longer hers; her 
only mother now is her mother-in-law. Her 
only family is her husband’s family, and his an¬ 
cestors are hers. If she pleases her mother-in- 
law she will have a happy time, but if she does 
not she may be very sad. If her husband is 
the oldest son it may not be so bad, but if he is 
a younger son, then she has to obey not only 
her mother-in-law but the wives of her hus¬ 
band’s brothers as well. There may be in one 
house in China a great many different families. 
A father and mother and their sons and their 
sons’ wives and any daughters that have not 
married and the little children of their married 
sons. Sometimes there are more than a hundred 
members of the family and servants and slaves 
in one Chinese home. The mother-in-law is 
the head of the house, and everyone of the 
younger women and all the men except her 
husband must obey her. 































LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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